login as: root
Authenticating with public key "router"
BusyBox v1.35.0 (2022-09-22 17:19:43 UTC) built-in shell (ash)
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| - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
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OpenWrt 22.03.0, r19685-512e76967f
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root@router:~# cd /tmp && sysupgrade -F -n -v FW_WRT32X_1.0.180404.58.im
g
Sun Sep 25 15:08:10 CEST 2022 upgrade: Image metadata not present
Image check failed but --force given - will update anyway!
Sun Sep 25 15:08:10 CEST 2022 upgrade: Commencing upgrade. Closing all shell sessions.
Command failed: Connection failed
root@router:/tmp#
but after reboot I cannot access the alternate partition. When switching back to the partition I did the upgrade from and looking into advanced reboot, I see the following:
I thought maybe the firmware file could be corrupted, but when downloading the file three times, it always had the same checksum (SHA256: 8a5dcaf95e418b86fdb09e5cef264b944bc21863db9728026d70027ee39c19a3), unfortunately Linksys didn’t provide a checksum on their homepage when uploading the file (https://support.linksys.com/kb/article/1030-en/), so maybe they are hosting a corrupt file?
I did this very same process for my WRT1900AC today as well, and for that device it worked without any issue. The only difference I recognized that far is the line `Command failed: Connection failed`, which didn’t appear during WRT1900AC firmware upgrade.
Thanks for comparing! The SHA265sum is the same after upload to the router.
Still silence from my WRT32X, therefore I started Wireshark and it seems there is no server at all on the router side running. My PC is not getting any IPv4/IPv6 via DHCP and those DHCP-requests (and some related stuff) are basically the own messages I can see on the connection.
Tested all 4 LAN ports of the WRT32x + WAN.
edit: I flashed OpenWrt 24.10.4 to partition 1 (maybe something could have been wrong with this partition?) and tried to flash factory image to partition 2, but the behaviour is the same:
It looks from my perspective that the flashing process has been successful.
in post one you demonstrate that Linksys firmware was flashed to the alternate partition from 23.05. You were also able to switch back to the current partition (23.05) and access it via ssh.
in post three you also demonstrate you were able to flash 24.10 from partition two to partition one as logic dictates, flash Linksys fw to partition two, and access the bOpenWrt partition one successfully.
And finally, your boot environment under OpenWrt is correct.
I do though have a question about this:
It appears you may have carried over your config from 23.05 to 24.10? This is fine if you intend to keep the device in service under OpenWrt, but the Linksys firmware sets the router ip to 192.168.1.1. Please verify your laptop -> router connection connects to the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet.
Yes, I checked that many times (with Windows desktop), I even tried a second device (Ubuntu laptop) and on my desktop to listen on the connection with Wireshark. There is no DHCP-server answering the DHCP-requests from my devices and when setting static IPs for the clients (with e.g. 192.168.1.100), 192.168.1.1 cannot be reached.
What is also weird: shouldn’t the Linksys image by default set up two SSIDs, one on 2,4GHz and one on 5GHz and shouldn’t the wireless-LED-symbols light up on the front of the router? This doesn’t happen on my device.
For me it seems like the Linksys installation is somewhat corrupted (no idea how to prove) and thus not active.
Did you try and flash the image on your device? Even if you have the same checksum, this does not necessarily mean the hosted image is intact.
Ok, so here is something really strange happening.
I thought I give it a try and reset the OpenWrt firmware to defaults (I want to sell the device anyways), flash OpenWrt to the alternative partition again and then try again flasing the original image. Now I got this as result:
There was a kernel partition resize change somewhere around v21 or v23 (cant remember) of OpenWRT.
The vendor firmware development stopped long ago during v17 and the old vendor firmware can’t deal with the OpenWRT caused kernel partition size change.
You need to flash e.g OpenWRT v18, v19 factory, not sysupgrade! (any version before the partition change will do). And then you should be able to flash back the vendor firmware of Linksys.
(And I still don’t get, why people make the effort return to the 8 year old buggy WRT vendor firmware, instead of selling it with recent OpenWRT )
Add on: v23 or v24 (?) had a WRT32X bug, where the partition did not alternate during OpenWRT flash. Not sure, if this also plays a role here.
Good point, I guess it is the “vanilla”-condition one (and least I) want to recreate.
Does that apply to WRT1900AC as well? On that device I had a quite old OpenWrt firmware (20.x or 21.x, don't remember well) and flashing worked straight away.
yes, but note that is specific topic for this device, starting with v21 or 23 comes with a changed partition schema. The sysupgrade image does not change the partition sizes.
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